On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 9:46 AM, Randall S. Becker
<rsbec...@nexbridge.com> wrote:
> On May 8, 2017 12:25 PM, Stefan Beller wrote:
>>On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 7:42 AM, Randall S. Becker <rsbec...@nexbridge.com>
>>wrote:
>>> On May 6, 2017 4:38 AM Ciro Santilli wrote:
>>>> This is a must if you are working with submodules, otherwise every
>>>> git checkout requires a git submodule update, and you forget it, and
>>>> things break, and you understand, and you go to stack overflow
>>>> questions
>>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22328053/why-doesnt-git-checkout-a
>>>> utomatically-do-git-submodule-update-recursive
>>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4611512/is-there-a-way-to-make-git
>>>> -pull-automatically-update-submodules
>>>> and you give up and create aliases :-)
>
>> The upcoming release (2.13) will have "git checkout --recurse-submodules",
>> which will checkout the submodules
>> at the commit as recorded in the superproject.
>> I plan to add an option "submodule.recurse" (name is subject to
>> bikeshedding), which would make the --recurse-submodules
>> flag given by default for all commands that support the flag. (Currently
>> cooking we have reset --recurse-submodules, already
>> existing there is push/pull).
>
> Brilliant! 😊
>
>>> I rather like the concept of supporting --recurse-submodules. The
>>> complexity is that the branches in all submodules all have to have
>>> compatible >>semantics when doing the checkout, which is by no means
>>> guaranteed. In the scenario where you are including a submodule from a
>>> third-party (very >>common - see gnulib), the branches likely won't be
>>> there, so you have a high probability of having the command fail or produce
>>> the same results as >>currently exists if you allow the checkout even with
>>> problems (another option?). If you have control of everything, then this
>>> makes sense.
>
>>I am trying to give the use case of having control over everything (or rather
>>mixed) more thought as well, e.g. "checkout --recurse-submodules -b ><name>"
>>may want to create the branches in a subset of submodules as well.
>
> I have to admit that I just assumed it would have to work that way this would
> not be particularly useful. However, in thinking about it, we might want to
> limit the depth of how far -b <name> takes effect. If the super module brings
> in submodules entirely within control of the development group, having -b
> <name> apply down to leaf submodules makes sense (in some policies). However,
> if some submodules span out to, say, gnulib, that might not make particular
> sense. Some downward limit might be appropriate. Perhaps, in the submodule
> ref, you might want to qualify it as <commit>:<ref> (but the impact of that
> is probably and admittedly pretty horrid). I hesitate to suggest a numeric
> limit, as that assumes that submodules are organized in a balanced tree -
> which is axiomatically unreasonable. Maybe something in .git/config, like
>
> [branch "topic*"]
> submodules=a,b,c
>
> But I suspect that would make things even more confusing.
I thought about having yet-another-flag in the .gitmodules file, which
states if the submodule is extern or internal.
[submodule "gnulib"]
path=./gnulib
external = true # implies no branch for checkout -b --recurse-submodules
I think there are a couple more situations where such "external" submodules
are treated differently, so maybe we'd want to think carefully about
the actual name
as different workflows would want to have different features for an
internal/external
submodule.
Thanks,
Stefan
